Letter of Oleg Sentsov written in the Russian prison, speaks for itself. “Do not try to fight for our release at any price, as it would not bring the victory nearer," he says. This is a daring act of a courageous man, especially in the context of terrible conditions of detention, details of which were unveiled by another Ukrainian political prisoner Gennady Afanasiev. The one who has experienced the whole “architecture of the Russian prison.”

We do not know whether Oleg Sentsov is able to track all the nuances of the Russian-Ukrainian agenda, but he has defined its main content very accurately. It is reduced to a simple formula – use the fate of Ukrainian prisoners as a bargaining chip in the war. Russia does not need Ukrainian citizens to exchange them for its own prisoners or to release the supporters of Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics from the Ukrainian prisons. Russia is not interested in these people. Kremlin's logic is to use the Ukrainian citizens, who are in captivity in Donbas and in Russia, as a weapon against Ukraine.

Whenever Kiev offers to exchange the prisoners, the militants refuse. Moreover, they put forward a full amnesty for themselves as the main condition for the exchange. The numbers do not matter; Ukraine can offer any exchange rates - 1 to 10 or 1 to 30, but it might not affect anything. Because Moscow has a completely different strategy.

Kremlin wants Ukraine to amnesty collaborators in occupied Donbas and give them an opportunity to participate in the local elections. Moreover, the militants have demanded that internally displaced persons, who moved to other regions of Ukraine with the beginning of the war, should not participate in these elections. In fact, they expect that the elections, which to be controlled by the Russian-backed militants, would legalize the self-proclaimed leaders of DPR and LPR. The final aim is to create a leash, controlled by the Kremlin, not by Kyiv. Russian plan is to turn Donbas in the "Trojan horse:" a kind of leash for Ukrainian sovereignty, which in addition will have control over the key decisions of the Ukrainian capital. The Kremlin wants Ukraine to become a buffer, as it used to be for the last 23 years.

When it became clear that Kyiv does not follow this scenario, Moscow decided to use Ukrainian prisoners as an object of blackmail. Their fate is now being used as a battering ram for the promotion of the Russian agenda. And any rallies under the Presidential Administration with a demand to speed up the exchange of Ukraine’s political prisoners play into the hands of Moscow.

If some informal Ukrainian representatives to push the idea of ​​"fighting for the release at any price" and go to the occupied Donbas, they would probably bring some Ukrainian soldiers back. And these same envoys, who returned to Kyiv, would promote the idea of Ukraine’s negotiations with the militants. An average person is not a calculator, she often prefers to be swept along by her emotions. And every time she loses to those who continue to adhere to the cold calculation.